Although a shopping cart is one of the most necessary elements associated with a trip to a grocery store, department store, warehouse club or the like, it is generally loathed by the majority of shoppers because of its inevitably misaligned, squeaky, and/or sticky wheels. Unfortunately, parents who must bring along one or more children while shopping are faced with a plethora of additional difficulties associated with the majority of presently available shopping cart configurations.
A shopping cart typically includes a frame assembly for supporting a plurality of wheels, a frame assembly for supporting a large basket into which purchases are placed, and a rearwardly facing folding child seat located within the rear section of the basket proximate the handlebar of the shopping cart. The child seat generally includes a small plastic base section on which a child sits, leg openings for receiving the legs of a child therethrough, a waist belt for securing a child therein and a backrest for supporting the back of a child, wherein the backrest is formed by a series of spaced rails.
The handlebar area and the nearby frame components are typically the most touched sections of a shopping cart. For example, in a grocery store that is open around the clock, a particular shopping cart may be handled and utilized by a large number of customers and employees of the store. Consequently, if one of the persons handling a particular shopping cart is ill with a cold, the flu or some other contagious disease, the illness may be spread to many of the other persons who subsequently come in contact with that shopping cart. Analogously, a child sitting in the child seat of that shopping cart may also stand a great chance of becoming sick because they oftentimes touch, chew, and/or lick those areas of the cart which may already have been infected.
When a child is initially placed into the child seat of a shopping cart, they are usually fascinated or distracted by their surroundings and are therefore content to remain seated within the child seat. After a few minutes, however, a child tends to become bored with his or her surroundings and subsequently looks for other avenues of amusement. Unfortunately, any activity other than sitting down in the child seat may lead to injuries, accidents and/or other parental annoyances. For example, the child may attempt to stand up in the child seat which may lead to the child falling into the basket of the shopping cart, thereby damaging any purchases therein or injuring the child. Similarly, the child may stand up in the child seat and subsequently fall out of the shopping cart onto the floor of the store, the sidewalk or the parking lot, potentially resulting in a serious injury or even death. Although commonly available shopping carts are equipped with a waist belt to avert the above-described accidents from occurring, most parents can attest to the fact that a child can easily squirm out of the waist belt with a minimum amount of effort. A child may also attempt to turn partially or entirely around in the child seat in order to play with the backrest or the purchases stored in the basket. Quite often, a child who has successfully turned around in the child seat is prone to remove one or more items from the basket and subsequently throw them to the ground, thereby damaging the item and/or creating a mess. Depending upon the policy of each particular store, the parent or other child supervisory personnel may be required to compensate the store for the damaged items. A child may also be injured while playing with the backrest of the shopping cart child seat. For example, a child may break or otherwise injure his or her fingers by inserting them through the series of spaced rails which form the majority of presently available child seat backrests. In particular, if the person controlling the shopping cart is required to suddenly turn the cart in a new direction while a child is inserting his or her fingers between the spaced rails, the momentum of the child's body may exert sufficient pressure between the fingers and the rails to cause an injury.
Oftentimes a parent is faced with the very difficult task of supervising two young children while shopping in a grocery or department store. Unfortunately, currently available shopping carts are designed to only accommodate a single child, thereby requiring the parent to carry the second child, or if the second child has learned to walk, to allow that child to walk next to the parent. In this situation, the parent must shop and perform a number of potentially nerve racking tasks all at the same time. For example, the parent must ensure that the child sitting in the shopping cart child seat does not perform any of the above-described potentially dangerous activities. In addition, the parent must ensure that the child who is walking does not wander or run away, does not pull items from shelves of the store and/or does not create other types of havoc.